Posse Incitatus

Memorial Day amongst the ruins: 2021

One of the classic precursors to the collapse of democratic government is military defeat. 

 

This need not lead to dictatorship or civil war, simply a new constitutional order, as happened when the Fourth French Republic gave way to the Fifth.

 

That these are the thoughts that come to mind on Memorial Day is a telling indicator that something is deeply wrong with our country.  Congressional Democrats want to establish a permanent military garrison in our nation's capital.  This is not what a popular government with record-seeking vote totals normally does.

 

Readers may well point out that the United States hasn't been defeated in the way of Imperial Germany in 1918, but victory also can be a source of unrest, particularly if the costs seem to vastly outweigh the benefits.  Both Japan and Italy were on the winning side of World War I, and yet both experienced changes in government because of internal discontent.

 

All of these examples have as a core feature the population's loss in confidence in the ruling class.  As we pause to consider our honored dead, we cannot help but ask why their sacrifice was necessary.  If one reads through the archives pertaining to this date, there is an obvious trend: from grim determination to disillusionment and finally where we are today, bitterness.

 

The earliest years of this blog sought to defend George W. Bush's policies and his leadership from vicious (and often dishonest) attacks.  What's striking to me today is how all of his worst enemies - the very people screaming that he was a war criminal - are now his political buddies.

 

A full reversal has occurred on the right as well, and it's remarkable to see.  I imagine a dialog between the two sides much go something like this:

 

The Right:  You know what?  You were right.  Bush was a criminal.

 

The Left:  No, he's a respectable leader, not like Drumpf!

 

The Right:  Wait, what?!  You called him Literal Hitler for years!

 

The Left:  Yeah, but that's before he became useful to us.

 

The Right:  What about his crimes?!

 

The Left:  Oh, we were never serious about that.  It was all politics.

 

Watching the classic Orwellian rehabilitation of Dubya is an object lesson in the left's endless ability to betray its principles.

 

And yet our dead remain dead.  

 

Did they die in vain?  Were the wars worth the cost?

 

I think they could have been.  A punitive expedition to rout the Taliban and break up their networks was both worthwhile and feasible.  Unfortunately, that offered insufficient opportunity for graft, so we went another route.

 

Similarly, removing Saddam Hussein from power started out as a political masterstroke, cowing America's enemies and offering a new global order where state-funded terrorism would be traced back to its sources.  Alas, our rulers didn't see the profit in that venture, either.

 

Again, it's illustrative that Dick Cheney was reviled for years as a war profiteer through Haliburton and yet our current Secretary of Defense is an actual board member of a weapons manufacturer - and no one on the left has a problem with this.

 

For all that, there was a brief dawning of hope at the end of the Trump administration when the Arab-Israeli conflict finally achieved a resolution.  The Abraham Accords and the promise they hold were the kind of solution that made the deaths of soldiers like Capt. Sean Grimes worthwhile.

 

Naturally, that achievement was denigrated and the Biden Administration's top priority is to pour arms and dollars into Syria, Iran and Palestinian terrorist organizations. 

 

And the peace movement?  Nowhere to be seen.

 

Nothing lasts forever, and governments have an expiration date.  It is inevitable that in the distant future a people completely strange to us will walk amidst the tumbled stones of Arlington and ponder what it was and why it was built with the same curiosity we regard Stonehenge or Saxon burial mounds.

 

All we can do is offer prayer for the dead and solace for the ones they have left behind.

 

And maybe, for a little while, the wars of choice will pause.

 

 

 

 

The Vanishing Moderate Left

In the comments, the question was raised:  Why do I paint the left with so broad a brush?  What about the moderate left, which is open to appeals to reason?

My answer is simply this: it's gone.

Look at the furor surrounding an attempt to by prominent writers to stand against "cancel culture."  The old liberal wing - based on free speech, individual liberty - has collapsed completely.

Slow Joe Biden, who was once something of a centrist (certainly he favored banking centers in Delaware), has now embraced every radical policy pushed by Bernie Sanders.  He was pitched in the primaries as the "safe, reasonable" choice, but his positions are indistinguishable from the radical "Squad" on the far left of the Democrat Caucus.

Even if the moderates hadn't immediately folded on their abortive letter in opposition to cancel culture, a close reading of it showed they didn't object to censorship by the mob, they merely objected to it being applied to them.

Leftist institutions are nothing more than front organizations pushing for the radical overthrow of the existing order.  The ACLU no longer supports free speech, the ADL is comfortable with anti-semitism so long as it supports their cause of Orange Man Bad.

Maybe these people will come out of their bunkers on election day, but I get a sense that they also dislike Trump and figure once he's gone, then they can take back their party.

But history shows that it won't work like that. 

Once the radicals gain the summit of power, they go into overdrive and their first victims will be the people on their own side who might get in their way.

You'd think the right wouldn't have to explain the left to itself, but I guess that's where we are.

Minnesota burning

Late yesterday the Flynn-Kislyak transcript was finally released.

And no one cared.

A number of Democrat-run satrapies are catching fire in response to alleged police brutality.  Oddly, Trump is on the side of the protestors and demanding a federal investigation, but the rioting continues.

I see chatter that maybe this is part of the Antifa network flexing its muscles in the run-up to the election.  If so, it's spectacularly self-defeating.  Hillary's already come out in favor of the rioters and Biden has to oppose Trump, whatever he does.

Which means the Silent Majority will have to vote for Nixon.

I mean, Trump.

What I find truly disconcerting is the number of affluent liberals who are cheering the rioters on - naturally from a safe distance.

Civic disorder isn't a form of performance art, and actual livelihoods are at stake.  The wealth being put to the torch is real.  It's clear that Trump hatred has gone beyond pathological into the realm of suicidal. 

Better the void than Trump.  We'll see shortly how many people are that committed to the kind of victory that leaves them masters of a barren, blasted land.

A Masked Memorial Day: 2020

Apparently honoring the dead isn't an "essential function."

None of the usual solemnities are scheduled, nominally because of the State of Emergency (which has been extended into a fourth month) regards them as inherently dangerous.  Standing in the open air of the cemetery carries too much risk of infection.

It's far safer to buy a lottery ticket in a liquor store.

Such is our world.

As is customary, each year I dedicate this post to a friend who died too soon, Capt. Sean Grimes.  He was engaged to be married, and by now he might be watching his kids graduate high school.

I remain convinced that striking militarily against both Afghanistan and Iraq after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks was both justified and worthwhile, but had I known it would be managed with such strategic ineptitude, I would have opposed both.

This is a bipartisan condemnation, because neither the Bush administration nor the Obama one had any plan other than managing an eternal conflict.  The lives of our troops were just the cost of doing business.  It's clear that the Democrats used the peace movement as a convenient club, because they're otherwise fine with Wars of Choice (see also, Libya, Syria, etc.).

Our leaders are fine about these losses because they don't know people like Sean.  He doesn't exist in their world, at least not that they know of.  Maybe if they went to his civilian medical practice in later years they'd note in passing an honorable discharge on the office wall, but maybe not.

But we remember him, and all others who - like him - have made the supreme sacrifice for their nation.

Rest in Peace.

Thanksgiving in the age of ingratitude

As always, we here at the Posse are thankful for Faith, Family and Freedom.

Sadly, too many people see the holiday as yet another opportunity to demonstrate their churlish ingratitude. 

This is the natural side-effect of prosperity combined with an entitlement mentality.  It's unlikely to change until things get much, much worse.

At any rate, enjoy the holiday and take a break from the madness of the internet.  Frequent visitors will notice that I'm following my own advice.

Demented Medicine

One of the most profound signs of our civilizational decay is the politicization of medicine.  For a century, western medical science brought a series of miracles, dramatically reducing disease and extending both the length and quality of human life.

That formidable achievement now seems to be inverting as fact-based science yields to politically correct imperatives.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the case of the transgender hysteria.

Even a cursory knowledge of childhood development would rule out allowing young children to make life-altering decisions.  Indeed, the age of consent exists precisely because children cannot make informed decisions.  It should be obvious that they lack the judgement and experience to do so.

Happily, nature provides parents to fulfill this role.  This brings us to the Big Lie that “trans kids” are expressing their true selves and good, responsible parents have a responsibility to cater to these self-destructive whims.

As one wag remarked, when you see a vegan cat or a trans kid, understand that neither of them are ones making that decision.

Not long ago, the medical establishment would highlight these actions as child abuse, but now a whole industry has emerged (backed of course by Big Pharma) to support it.

What’s interesting is that none of the new “treatment protocols” have any data behind them.  It’s all based on hunches, supposition and of course intense lobbying by interested parties.

The Daily Wire lays it out very clearly: the “therapeutic” drugs are being used off-label and are highly dangerous. 

Moreover, “blocking” puberty is an inherently toxic event.  Puberty unfolds differently in each individual and it is a time-sensitive process.  One can’t simply hit a “pause” button and expect it to resume if the patient has a change of heart.

The awful truth – which I have noted repeatedly on this site – is that even “successful” transitions are sterile.  They do not become the opposite sex, but instead a facsimile sustained by dangerous concoctions of hormones and chemicals.  It’s biological cosplay with real-world effects.

It is no more compassionate to help a mentally disturbed person persist in their illusion that they can change sexes than it is to buy a drink for an alcoholic or buy a hit for a drug addict.

At some point – hopefully soon – there will be a dreadful reckoning on what these twisted people have done to innocent children.

Molotov-Ribbentrop at 80: The concentrated essence of unprincipled leftism

Today marks the 80^th anniversary of the infamous Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact, which sealed the fate of Poland and set the stage for World War II.

The alliance was purely tactical for both parties.  Joseph Stalin wanted to push his frontier further west and gain hegemony over western Poland, parts of Finland and the Baltic States.  Adolf Hitler wanted to avoid a second front during his ongoing showdown with the western Allies.

After years of heated vitriol, both totalitarian states turned on a dime, going from hating one another to proclaiming the wisdom of rapprochement so they could fight the true common enemy, western liberal democracy and capitalism.

The alliance was the basis for George Orwell’s famous formulation that “We’ve always been at war with Eastasia,” reflecting the ease with which the propagandists did a complete reversal on the Nazi-Soviet relationship and then reversed themselves again when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June of 1941.

The crucial lesson of this anniversary is that the left is utterly without principle.  It has but one goal: total, unbridled power.

This is how people who claim to worry about carbon emissions fly around on private jets and live lavish lifestyles while hectoring poor people to give up hamburgers.

It is how we must “believe all women” - unless they are accusing Bill Clinton.

Barack Obama and Eric Holder are free to call for more gun control even though it was their policy not to prosecute gun law violations.

The means are irrelevant to these people and even their goals are negotiable because all that matters is power for its own sake.  Arguably, they don’t have a clear vision of what they will do with it, other than enjoy its free and easy exercise.

Oh, and crush their enemies utterly.  That part at least is known.

This is why the best analogy to the contemporary US is not its previous civil war, but rather then one in Spain from 1936 to 1939.  Then as now, a major part of the divide was between the right – who respected institutions and culture – and the left, which respecting nothing but its quest for power.

The Spanish “Republic” was nothing of the sort, and it leaders were quite willing to rule by decree and use political assassinations and militias to achieve their goals.

Far from being a true Popular Front, the government was bitterly divided between Socialists, Communists and Anarchists, with only the common enemy of traditional Spanish culture and the Catholic Church holding them together.

What made the war inevitable, with the Popular Front’s abuse of power and its seeming pleasure in flaunting it.  Here we see a clear parallel with the left’s treatment of Antifa.  Just as in Spain, law enforcement has zero interest in breaking up the terrorist organization and instead blames their atrocities on their victims.

All of this has the effect of radicalizing the middle class, which is the crucial precondition for civil war.

The left seems convinced that this won’t happen, or that if it does, they will win easily.  The Popular Front felt the same way and it didn’t work out well for them.

Spain was the first time fascists and communists clashed militarily, with the Soviet Union backing the Republic while Germany and Italy sided with the insurgent Nationalists.

It was billed by both sides as an existential struggle and yet no sooner had the Spanish war drawn to a close than Hitler and Stalin were able to forge their infamous pact.

Because the pursuit of power demanded it and both Stalin and Hitler were leftists in every sense.

Today should be a reminder that the left is implacable, knowing no decent limits and eager to make a deal with anyone and everything to achieve power.

The "Cold Civil War" gets warmer

I've noted before that societies do not descend into civil war all at once.  Rather it is a gradual, uneven process the moves by fits and starts, sometimes reversing, but never long enough to stop its downward spiral.

The past few weeks have given us a number of examples that future generations might call "milestones to war."

• The savage beating of journalist Andy Ngo in broad daylight in full view of the police.  Liberal apologists for the Antifa Stosstruppen are trying to claim that he's a conservative provocateur, but in fact his politics are firmly on the left - he just likes following a good story.
• Facebook's revised policy on death threats, which forbade them - except in cases where they were issued against people the management didn't like.  This illegal policy was almost immediately rescinded, but one has to wonder what kind of idiots signed off on it in the first place.
• The spectacle of CNN/Playboy "Journalist" Brian Karem taunting attendees at a White House event and then challenging Sebastian Gorka to a fight in full view of the press - and then lying about it afterwards.  It wasn't exactly an attack on the Senate floor, but it was close.  Also indicative - mainstream press lied about what happened, choosing an edited version of the tape with Karem's taunting and challenge omitted.
• The growing public knowledge of Jeffrey Epstein's predations, which happened in plain sight of the Ruling Class for years - and the fact that despite his conviction, they continued to party and socialize with him.
• The Democrat Party's full embrace of erasing US borders and it's open preference for non-citizens. 
• The US "National" Women's Soccer Team openly insulting the National Anthem and trampling the flag during one of their tasteless celebrations.

I could go on, but the sum total of each of these events is to destroy the social contract that holds the nation together.  If citizenship is meaningless and the "national team" feels it can insult the nation's symbols with impunity, what's left?

It's clear that the Democrats have no grand design or carefully crafted plan once they gain control, just a series of anti-American impulses to destroy our institutions.  When 50 million Central Americans enter the country, they have no idea how they will govern it and this doesn't seem to bother them.

It's interesting to see how much this insanity is radicalizing the center.  I've watched with great interest as otherwise moderate or non-political entities and publications have changed their tone. 

Sohrab Amadi's famous essay has struck a nerve and I'm noticing a change in both attitude and behavior among Kurt Schlichter's "normals."  No longer is there an easy-going sense that this will all blow over, or that cooler heads on the left will rein in the crazies.  Instead there is a defiance, a stridency on the part of the center that wasn't there a year ago.

It comes from a simple realization:  They really do hate us.

I don't think the left is capable of understanding where this will go, but it won't be pleasant for anyone.

In Defense of Marianne Williamson

A lot of conservatives are picking apart the aphorisms of Democrat presidential hopeful Marianne Williamson and though I initially joined in the laughter, I've since come to conclude that it's poor form.

Whether you like self-help gurus or not, a lot of what she says is good to hear and worth repeating.

It's interesting that the Catholic Conservatives on Twitter are frantically retweeting many of her items about God and spirituality (particularly forgiveness) and they seem to be doing it in an unironic way, adding positive commentary.

Of course, there's also a little fun going on here, since I'm sure she considers traditionalist right-to-lifers to be her mortal...adversaries, or something.  Maybe enemies.  She doesn't like Trump, that's for sure.

At any rate, her qualities as a motivator may be debatable but her qualifications for executive power are not.  There is no indication that her skillset is suitable to navigate the twisted Machiavellian world of international relations. 

The funny thing is I think Trump could charm the socks off her.  A debate between them would simply be him admitting that all the things she thinks are correct and that he too wants a better world. 

Contra the Quisling Never Trumpers, one of the things that attracts evangelical and other Christians to Trump is his lack of pretension regarding morality.  He doesn't judge and doesn't claim to be holier than anyone else.  He seems genuinely in awe of observant religious people.

He's also the first president in decades to take the Right to Life movement seriously and speak openly about what abortion is in practical terms.  He's taken concrete action as well to defend religious freedoms, which cannot be overlooked.

We may admire saints, but they do not always make the best practical leaders.  Gandhi was a very spiritual man (albeit with a number of seldom-discussed oddities) but in terms of politics, he was a disaster and the party he led became a sink of crony corruption.

A less spiritually enlightened man might have served India (and Pakistan and Bangladesh) much better.

The Conservative Counter-Reformation

The intra-conservative debate over David French-ism has abated.  If anything, the anti-French-ist forces are building newer and more powerful arguments to assert their position.

These are moving beyond the realm of tactics and into the weeds of the entire philosophical basis of conservatism and the fundamental weakness at the core of classical liberalism.

In a nutshell, liberalism has failed because it places individual autonomy at the highest plane, making moral considerations secondary at best.

Thus, David French's claim that "sincere religious belief" has to be respect must necessarily collapse when said religion hurts someone else's feelings.  Their "right" to be free of offense supersedes someone else's "right to hate."

Indeed, we're seeing this argument already being deployed by the left.  Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel recently said that religious beliefs cannot justify "hate," and of course she's the one who gets to decide which beliefs are acceptable.

In a sense, this debate somewhat mirrors the old Catholic vs Protestant split, with non-conformists being deeply distrustful of state power and therefore blind to discrimination by non-state actors.

Senator Josh Hawley's bill requiring online platforms to be certified as non-discriminatory as a condition for legal immunity from defamation lawsuits is a great example of this split.  The French-ist wing claims that the left will abuse this regulatory authority should they gain power - ignoring that the left already has de facto power over the marketplace.

The left can also (and has) twisted its regulatory power without provocation, so they don't require a precedent in order to abuse their authority.

It is an open question on how much of this debate is really corporate shills earning paychecks to defend their sugar daddies.  Jonah Goldberg in particular seems to argue almost entirely from a dishonest position and seems to spend his time picking - and losing - Twitter fights with actual conservatives. 

Tellingly, he's the first to make personal attacks and when they are reciprocated, runs around asking for backup against his target.  Amusingly, the reinforcements almost always accrue to whoever he's fighting.